About Lamberts

Lamberts is a Norwich-based distributor of lubricants, fasteners, pipeline, tools and safetywear and is a member of the National Merchants Buying Society (NMBS). Established since 1963 the company puts its success down to the loyalty and dedication of a great team and the desire to give their customers, many of whom have been using them for 50 years, the very best service.

Lamberts currently employs 44 members of staff and has 17,000 stock lines, 4,000 customers and processes around 800 sales orders per week.

prof.ITplus was installed at Lamberts in 2013.

Number of Employees: 44

Partnered with OGL since: 2013

Company Location: Norwich

Company Website: www.lamberts.co.uk

Lamberts uses prof.ITplus to meet customer service objectives and delivery targets

Lamberts is a prime example of a customer that has purchased prof.ITplus and has gone on to reap the full range of business benefits it offers by ensuring the system is fully integrated within the organisation and is functioning at its optimum level.

Lamberts has been using prof.ITplus since 2013 when it decided to upgrade its business systems to coincide with the company’s 50th anniversary and signal its intention to push on and continue its growth.

The company’s About Us webpage references Lamberts’ ambition “to maintain the best traditions of personal service, coupled with the efficiencies gained from advanced technology” so we talked to the Operations Director, who has been with Lamberts for 29 years, to find out about the contribution prof.ITplus has made towards this company goal.

“We’ve always been keen to use technology to push Lamberts ahead of the competition and investing in prof.ITplus two years ago is another example of this. Since we found out about prof.ITplus we were keen to take the plunge and it’s paid off.”

“The business is a lot easier to manage now. We were using Charisma from 1989 until 2013 and were relatively content with it but once we heard about the power of prof.ITplus we knew it was time to once again use technology to take us up a notch. The abundance of features within prof.ITplus is quite staggering really.”

Data transfer

One of the key issues when moving to any new business management software is the correct transfer of existing company data into the new system. OGL’s Data Transfer Team are highly skilled data analysts with the specific knowledge for this type of work.

“We needed to retain seven years’ worth of invoice history so I needed to be sure that this task was in the safest of hands. I informed OGL how I wanted the old data to appear in the new system and we worked together to extract everything required from Charisma and import it accurately into prof.ITplus.”

“The data transfer aspect of the project was a big concern for me so I remember asking lots of questions about this process. I had to have full confidence before committing to such an instrumental change for the business but OGL clearly had a lot of experience and expertise in this area.”

Purchasing

“Two years after bringing prof.ITplus to Lamberts I would say that purchasing is the area of the business that has felt the biggest impact. Our buyers have found prof.ITplus so easy to use and I’m sure it’s made their job a lot easier because we have set the system up to generate purchase orders automatically based on stock levels, customer orders and buying trends. With 17,000 stock lines the time prof.ITplus has saved our purchasing team is very impressive meaning they can focus on other business objectives.”

Marketing

“The CRM [Customer Relationship Management] module has a built-in email function, allowing me to email over 4,000 named contacts from the CRM database with e-shots about trade days, special offers and useful company information. This has been fundamental for maximising spend-per-customer and has generated thousands of pounds of orders for what is a fairly quick task.”

Not only does the CRM manage out-going customer communications as described, it also houses all incoming communication from the customer by recording all emails relating to the customer in one single screen. This means that colleagues across the company can email customers safe in the knowledge that other colleagues can see what has been said thanks to the ability of prof.ITplus to recognise an email address, link it to a customer account and save a copy of the email in prof.ITplus accordingly.

Of course other information, including sales enquires, order history and sales ledger is also stored against customers’ records meaning staff can deal with customers knowledgably giving them a great customer experience.

Profit levels

In prof.ITplus, when an invoice is produced, the system will look at the selling prices and compare them to the purchased prices to check profit levels. If pre-set profit margins are not hit, the system will flag the invoice for review. Lamberts commented that this ability to check profitability at invoice level was probably his favourite feature of prof.ITplus.

“It allows managers to unapprove invoices that don’t meet our requirements and gives the chance to investigate and amend where necessary,” said Lamberts.

This feature is another way that prof.ITplus can strip hours of manual admin processes from a business and ensure any unprofitable lines are very quickly highlighted and the necessary action taken.

Lamberts is visited around three times per year by their Account Manager, James Shelley, and Lamberts stated that it has been an invaluable part of the service to have James travel to Norwich every few months to talk about the system and ensure Lamberts is up-to-date with the free-of-charge upgrades to the system that are launched every other month. “It’s been great to forge a good relationship with James and therefore between our companies. My last software provider would visit, on average, once every five years so this is a very welcome additional benefit to OGL’s service.”

OGL is always delighted to hear of customers who are so happy with prof.ITplus. Even more so when companies contact us to say prof.ITplus has been recommended by existing customers. One company has already purchased prof.ITplus following Lamerts recommendation and another took the final decision to purchase following a visit to the Lamberts site to see prof.ITplus in action.